Orchestration Services for Distributed Multimedia Synchronisation

Rapid developments in networking technology over the past few years have lead to the emergence of distributed applications which incorporate continuous media data types such as digital video and audio. Such applications have stringent real-time synchronisation requirements which have been documented in the literature. However, little research has been carried out into suitable mechanisms to support such synchronisation. This paper presents a multimedia synchronisation architecture and a detailed description of the lower layer services of the architecture. The paper also provides a rationale for the services by describing a real world application area and illustrates how the services can be exploited in this application area. Because the services described incorporate a variety of co-ordination functions over multiple transport connections a more general term, orchestration, is introduced to describe the low level synchronisation services.